Power Rangers Megaforce is a cash grab. It feels soulless and uninspired by the source material. It’s a repetitive hack and slash withPower Rangers Megaforce is a cash grab. It feels soulless and uninspired by the source material. It’s a repetitive hack and slash with fighting mechanics that never should have made it out of the alpha testing phase. Don’t waste your time or money on this one.
I did not watch Power Rangers as a kid, but I’m pretty familiar with the story. I can’t say the same about Access Digital or Digital Works. The characters are completely devoid of their personalities from the show, even in the cutscenes. There’s a menu option which gives brief descriptions of each character, and while they’re relatively accurate, none of it shows in the game. Jake never drags Noah into anything, Gia and Emma’s relationship is nonexistent, none of that. Also, here seems to be the best place to pose this question: if the show emphasizes friendship and teamwork, why is this not a co-op game? In each stage you can switch between Power Rangers using the L and R buttons, but that’s it. Sure, sometimes one Ranger comes out of nowhere and kills enemies, but it feels like the Mighty Eagle in Angry Birds more than actual teamwork.
There is a metric ton of superfluous garbage thrown into the game. Take Gaori coins, for example: scattered throughout the level, yet there’s no way to spend them. Also throughout the level is random commentary from the inactive Power Rangers. I never thought I would say this, but I desperately need the Power Rangers to shut up. Every two seconds or so, one of them will say one of a few lines of dialogue, sometimes pertaining to what you have to do in a certain section, but most often it’s not. The constant chatter adds nothing to the game, it adds nothing to the story, and it is never used to develop the characters into what Saban originally intended. Another tacked on addition to the game is photo morphing. Take a photo of your face and watch a cheap animation play over the photo, turning you into one of the Power Rangers. Not only is this cheap and stupid, but it’s also contradictory to the story. In the game, you have agreed to fight alongside the Power Rangers against the forces of evil. But then in that animation, you become one of the pre-existing Power Rangers. So am I one of the established Power Rangers or am I an ally of the Megaforce? The face photo thing detracts from the game more than it adds to it.
My primary issue with combat in Power Rangers Megaforce is that the Power Rangers “lean into” their attacks. What I mean by this is that the animations are slow, each strike carries the Power Ranger forward a little bit, and it is very difficult to turn around. And when hordes of enemies drop in to surround you, your attacks make your six extremely vulnerable. Or at least they would with competent enemies, which leads me to my secondary issue with combat: the enemies are all the same. I mentioned that this game was a repetitive hack-and-slash, and the reason for that is largely due to the fact that throughout the entire game you won’t see much more than green ninja guys coming at you. Sure, there are blue ones and red ones sometimes, but they don’t provide much additional challenge. I went through entire stages without taking one hit. Sometimes the enemies don’t know which way to face and beat the ever-living crap out of a wall that I was standing on for a brief moment. To quote Jakes only combat dialogue line, “The bugs are too much for me, man!” (There are no bugs for the Power Rangers to fight throughout the game. Maybe a voice actor saw the gameplay and blurted that line out?)
I mentioned earlier that this game was a cash grab. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s a rushed game based on a popular franchise, no. I mean it’s a cash grab in that it takes a page from the HyperScan’s book and uses cards you can scan into the game. Power Cards are integral to experiencing the full game, and you can find them in certain parts of the stages. But apparently the only way to use the Power Cards was to buy them in stores. I haven’t been able to find any Power Rangers Megaforce card packs online, and I know that the game was bundled with a few cards, but it doesn’t change the fact that the game operated heavily on physical dlc, which is the epitome of a cash grab.
Fans will hate this game because of how distanced it feels from the Power Rangers Megaforce TV show. People who are indifferent to Power Rangers (such as myself) will hate it because the bad fighting mechanics and messy presentation make it a bad game at its core. Either way, this game is not worthy of its space on your game shelf.… Expand